“It was a good thing I went alone: they are frightened and surly down there. News has come down the road to Soubridge.” He crunched the apple. “The Moidart has taken Low Leedale, thrown down Duirinish-with great loss of life-and now marches on Viriconium.
“Between the Pastel City and Soubridge, the geteit chemosit are abroad by night, killing with no reason.”
He ate the apple core, spat the pips impudently at Birkin Grif-who was sharpening his sword with a piece of sandstone he kept in his belt for that purpose-and lay down on his exoskeleton. “They have given me directions, more or less precise.” He strapped himself up, rose to his feet, once more a giant. He pointed out over the basalt cliffs, his motors humming.
“Our goal lies east and a little inland. The fishermen cooled further toward me when they learnt of my destination: they have little like of this Cellur. He is seen rarely, an old man. They regard him superstitiously, and call him ‘The Lord of the Birds.’ ”
8
In each of them had grown a compulsion to avoid roads and centres of population: by this, they were driven to travel the wilderness that stretches from Lendalfoot to the Cladich Marshes-a hinterland ruined and botched when the Afternoon Cultures were nothing but a dream in the germ-plasm of an ape, a stony wreckage of deep ravines and long-dormant volcanic vents.
“It is a poor empire I have,” said Methvet Nian, “win or lose. Everywhere, the death of the landscape. In miniature, the end of the world.”
No one answered her, and she drew her hood over her face.
It had not snowed in the South, but a continual rain lashed the grey and leafless vegetation, glossed the black basalt and pumice, and made its way in the form of agitated streams through the ravines to the sea. At night, electrical flares danced about the summits of the dead volcanoes, and the columnar basalt formations took on the aspect of a giant architecture.
As they went, they were shadowed and haunted by birds-ominous cruciform silhouettes high against the angry sky.
They reached the tower of Cellur in the evening of the second day. Cresting a ridge of pitted dolerite, they came upon the estuary of one of the unnamed rivers that ran from the mountains behind Cladich. Luminous in the fading light, the water spread itself before them like a sheet of metal. High black escarpments dropped sheer to its dark beaches; the cold wind made ephemeral, meaningless patterns on its surface.
Set in the shallows near the western bank was a small domed island, joined to the mainland by a causeway of crumbling stone blocks. It was barren but for a stand of white, dead pines.
Out of the pines, like a stone finger diminished by distance, rose the tower. It was five-faced, tapering: black. A tiny light shone near its summit, a glow that flickered, came and went. Birds wheeled about it, wailing mournfully, dipping to skim the water-fish eagles of a curious colour, with wings like cloaks in a gale.
“There is nothing for us here,” said Birkin Grif abruptly. “Only a lunatic would choose to live here. Those fishermen had the right of it.”
But Cromis, who understood isolation, and was reminded of his own tower among the rowans of Balmacara, shook his head. “It is what we came for, Grif. Those birds: look, they are not made of flesh.” He touched the corpse of the iridium vulture hanging from his belt. “We will go down.”
The estuary was filled with a brown, indecisive light, the island dark and ill-defined, enigmatic. The creaking of the dead pines came clearly across the intervening water on the wind. From a beach composed of fine basalt grit and littered with skull-sized lumps of volcanic glass, they mounted the causeway. Its stones were soapy and rotten; parts of it were submerged under a few inches of water.
They were forced to go in single file, Cromis bringing up the rear. As they drew nearer the island, Tomb the Dwarf unlimbered his axe, and Grif, drawing his broadsword a little way out of its scabbard, scowled about him as if he suspected a conspiracy against his person on the part of the landscape.
With damp feet, they stood before the tower.
It had been formed in some unimaginable past from a single obsidian monolith two hundred feet long by seventy or eighty in diameter; raised on its end by some lost, enormous trick of engineering; and fused smoothly at its base into the bedrock of the island. Its five facets were sheer and polished; in each was cut twenty tall, severe windows. No sound came from it; the light at its summit had vanished; a stony path led through the ghostly pines to its door.
Tomb the Dwarf chuckled gently to himself. “They built to last,” he said proudly to Cromis, as if he had personally dug the thing up from a desert. “You can’t deny that.” He strutted between the trees, his armour silver and skeletal in the dusk. He reversed his axe and thundered on the door with its haft.
“Come out!” he shouted. “Come out!” He kicked it, and his metal leg rang with the blow, but no one came. Up above their heads, the fish eagles made restless circles. Cromis felt Methvet Nian draw closer to him. “Come on out, Birdmaker!” called Tomb. “Or I’ll chop your gate to match-wood,” he added. “Oh, I’ll carve it!”
Soft but distinct in the silence that followed this threat, there came a dry, reedy laugh.
Birkin Grif cursed foully. “At your backs!” he bellowed, lugging out his heavy blade. Horrified by his own lack of foresight, Cromis turned to meet the threat from behind. Sweat was on his brow, the nameless sword was in his hand. Up above, the fish eagles gyred like ghosts, screaming. The pathway through the pines yawned-a tunnel, a trap, a darkness. He aimed a savage overhand stroke in the gloom, a cut that was never completed.
It was Cellur of Lendalfoot who stood there, the Birdmaker.
The Lord of the Birds was so old that he seemed to have outstripped the mere physical symptoms of his age and passed into a Timelessness, a state of exaltation.
His long, domed skull was fleshless, but his skin was smooth and taut and unwrinkled, so fine and tight as to be almost translucent. His bones shone through it, like thin and delicate jade. It had a faint, yellow tint, in no way unhealthy, but strange.
His eyes were green, clear, and amused; his lips were thin.
He wore a loose, unbelted black robe-quilted in grouped arrangements of lozenges-which was embroidered in gold wire patterns resembling certain geometries cut into the towers of the Pastel City: those queer and uneasy signs that might equally have been the visual art or the language or the mathematics of Time itself.
They had this property: that, when he moved, they seemed to shift and flow of their own accord, divorced entirely from the motions of the cloth of which they were a part.
“Hold your weapon, my lord,” he murmured, as the point of the nameless sword hovered indecisively at his old throat. He eyed the dead lammergeyer dangling from Cromis’s belt.
“I see by my bird that you are tegeus-Cromis. You have already left your visit too long. It would be a pity if you were to compound the error by killing the one you came to see.”
He laughed.
“Come. We will go in-” He indicated his tower. “You must introduce me to your energetic friend with the power-axe. He would like to kill me, I feel, but he must save that pleasure. No dwarf likes to be made a butt. Ah well.”
Stubborn Grif, however, would have none of it. When Cromis put up his sword, he showed no sign of following. He confronted the old man.
“You are either fool or malefactor,” he said, “to risk death, as you have just done, for such a silly trick. In coming here, we have killed more men than you have eaten hot meals, and many for less than that practical joke.
“I should like proof that you are the former, senile but well-meaning, before I enter your house.